Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In 2007, what was the landscape in the e-commerce shopping cart or the e-commerce platform world? What was going on around you? What was the competitive landscape? Whom did you compete with directly and indirectly?

Rick Wilson: Yahoo stores was still a popular platform. I wouldn’t say that it had momentum, but it was certainly popular. The osCommerce software, which had been very popular, had faltered. I was never a big osCommerce guy, so I can’t remember if they released version three or four. They were in between major versions and it just died on the vine. They never got the major version out. I think Magento’s alpha was announced during that time. Shopify was just starting to arrive on the scene. I heard about them in 2008. Volution was probably the earliest success story as a pure play Software as a Service platform provider in our space.

The space was disjointed. At some level, that’s true today although it’s come down to two or three players on the SaaS side. The space was very disjointed and there wasn’t a clear winner. I don’t think there’ll ever be a majority share player in our space. There are too many unique business needs for that to happen.

Sramana Mitra: Elaborate on that. From the scenario you described in 2007, we are sitting seven years later in 2014. It’s a space that we cover quite extensively. I’ve just recently released a book called From E-Commerce To Web3.0 as part of the Entrepreneur Journeys Series. We’ve had all these major players on the Entrepreneur Journeys Series.

We know the space quite well. It seems like Shopify now has a couple of hundred thousand merchants. Bigcommerce has over 50,000 merchants. Volution probably has that many. There are definitely three or four major players. Magento is inside eBay now and there seem to be some question marks around where Magento is going.

Seven years later as the market has evolved, what are the major trends that have evolved in that market? When you say there are too many unique needs of the industry, what are those major needs that are around which companies have gained traction at?

Rick Wilson: When we started in e-commerce in the 90’s, the majority of our customers were technical at a minimum. They understood what the service specs meant. They cared about what operating system they were running. In this day and age, there’s only a passing reason for an entrepreneur to know those things. The only passing reason for them to even know is to make an educated decision about something they can scale. Not all technologies are equal. Magento’s community edition may be free, but it also is known as being a bit of a resource hog. So not all free is created equal. On the other hand, if you sign up for Shopify, you don’t have to think about the technology at all, yet you’re fundamentally limited by a combination of add-ons, API, and what’s built in and out of the box.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Rick Wilson, President of Miva Merchant
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